Date: Thu, 3 Apr 1997 15:15:23 -0500 (EST) From: Paul W Brannan To: Pedro Giffuni cc: alaric AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk, opendos-developer AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: The compiling tools In-Reply-To: <334337DF.232C@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > I don't think we should extend MS-DOS. Microsoft doesn't care about us, > we shouldn't care about them either. The reason for supplying LFN extensions to MS-DOS is so that we will gain support for OpenDOS. That's how IBM became successful in the PC market. They gave away specs for their systems, so other companies could make clones. That was great, because more people bought PC's, knowing that it would be compatible with whatever software they bought. Then, when IBM came out with the PS/2, they kept the design a secret. That's why Linux won't run on computers with MCA architecture. Anyway, about the time the PS/2 came out was about the time that other companies started thriving; they came up with their own standards, etc., which were even better. I don't think we have to worry about helping Microsoft out. Microsoft doesn't care about DOS; to them, DOS is dead. To the average user, however, LFN support in DOS would be great, but most people aren't going to move to OpenDOS right away. They probably won't ever move to OpenDOS, no matter what we do. But if we have a standard that will work on MS-DOS, OpenDOS, and Win95/DOS, then programmers will be more likely to support these features (no one wants to write software for an architecture that nobody uses!). I say that LFN support should be available in a device driver format so that people can use LFN's in MS-DOS as well. Paul